Hacker News

Facebook is cooked

2026-02-2018:251513847pilk.website

Through the mirror into the lightly-clothed AI gooniverse

And I don't just mean that nobody uses it anymore. Like, I knew everyone under 50 had moved on, but I didn't realize the extent of the slop conveyor belt that's replaced us.

I logged on for the first time in ~8 years to see if there was a group for my neighborhood (there wasn't). Out of curiosity I thought I'd scroll a bit down the main feed.

The first post was the latest xkcd (a page I follow). The next ten posts were not by friends or pages I follow. They were basically all thirst traps of young women, mostly AI-generated, with generic captions. Here's a sampler — mildly NSFW, but I did leave out a couple of the lewder ones:

A collage of Facebook posts of random women in revealing clothing

Click to show mildly sensitive content (revealing clothing)

Yikes. Again, I don't follow any of these pages. This is all just what Facebook is pushing on me.

I know Twitter/X has worse problems with spam bots in the replies, but this is the News Feed! It's the main page of the site! It's the product that defined modern social media!

It wasn't all like that, though. There was also an AI video of a policeman confiscating a little boy's bike, only to bring him a brand new one:

Facebook post of an AI generated video with a policeman and child

And there were some sloppy memes and jokes, mostly about relationships, like this (admittedly not AI) video sketch where a woman decides to intentionally start a fight with her boyfriend because she's on her period:

Facebook post of a video sketch

Maybe that isn't literally about sex, but I'd classify it as the same sort of lizard-brain-rot engagement bait as those selfies. Meta even gives us some helpful ideas for sexist questions we can ask their AI about the video:

Suggested AI prompt: why do women feel refreshed after arguments?

Yep, that's another "yikes" from me. To be fair, though, sometimes that suggested questions feature is pretty useful! Like with this post, for example:

Facebook post with photos of a woman in a short dress, possibly AI. Suggested AT prompts are: why is she wearing pink heels? What is the woman's personality?

Why is she wearing pink heels? What is her personality? Great questions, Meta.

I said these were "mostly" AI-generated. The truth is with how good the models are getting these days, it's hard to tell, and I think a couple of them might be real people.

Still, some of these are pretty obviously AI. Here's one with a bunch of alien text and mangled logos on the scoreboard in the background:

Facebook post of an AI photo of a woman in a football stadium

Hmm, I wonder if anyone has noticed this is AI? Let's check out the comments and see if anyone's pointed that ou—

Comments on the above picture, mostly variations on Beautiful and I love you

...never mind. (I dunno, maybe those are all bots too.)

So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm?

I mean... maybe? That's part of the whole thing with these algorithmic feeds; it's hard to know if anyone else is seeing what I'm seeing.

On the one hand, I doubt most (straight) women's feeds would look like this. But on the other hand, I hadn't logged in in nearly a decade! I hate to think what the feed looks like for some lonely old guy who's been scrolling the lightly-clothed AI gooniverse for hours every day.

Did everyone but me know it was like this? I'd seen screencaps of stuff like the Jesus-statue-made-out-of-broccoli slop a year or two ago, but I thought that only happened to grandmas. I hadn't heard about anything like this.

I wonder if this evolution was less noticeable for people who are logging in every day. Or maybe it only gets this bad when there aren't any posts from your actual friends?

In any case, I stopped exploring after I saw a couple more of those AI-generated pictures but with girls that looked like they were about ~14, which made me sick to my stomach. So long Facebook, see you never, until one day I inexplicably need to use your platform to get updates from my kid's school.


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Comments

  • By mbo 2026-02-2020:2545 reply

    My mother is an international flight attendant in her 60s.

    I recently caught a glimpse of her Facebook and I was shocked to discover a version of the website that seemed to be the platonic ideal of exactly what all the Facebook PMs intended. Her feed was filled with the photos of her friends and coworkers international trips and holidays, posts in groups for planning activities in her most frequented cities. But I discovered that my mum was also a frequent "poster" of the photos of her various trips around the world, and the comments sections were filled with with some beautiful messages from her many many friends and family.

    From this I learned that there is a subset of the population that Facebook works perfectly for and meaningfully improves their real-world social relationships. And perhaps Facebook has been hyper-optimized for that kind of use case through relentless A/B testing. But I fear my mum is quite privileged to have this kind of experience.

    • By whyenot 2026-02-210:143 reply

      As a middle aged (gen x) woman, my facebook feed is pretty good. It's filled with posts from friends and interest groups that I am a part of. The reason I no longer use FB has nothing to do with the feed, it's because Mark Zuckerberg is an awful person, and I refuse to use his product. The cognitive dissonance is great here, because I still use WhatsApp; it's the best way to stay in contact with my relatives in Europe, and I still use IG, albeit mostly for work, and sparingly.

      • By dboreham 2026-02-210:365 reply

        I'm still a FB user even though most friends and relatives have disengaged due to toxicity. But what I've noticed consistently is that any group on FB that has more than 1000 members will end up surfacing so much toxic sentiment that I have to unsubstantiated. I'm talking about innocuous fields such as the local road conditions. That one became full of rants about out of state drivers, drivers who don't understand English, people posting license plates of bad drivers, etc. This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.

        • By rightbyte 2026-02-2111:482 reply

          > This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.

          I think what happens is that the risk of including a critical amount of "toxics" (lacking a better word) such that they can keep a conversation going, increases by FB group size. Without actice moderators it doesn't take much.

          • By hogwasher 2026-02-231:20

            I think it is important to remember that only a tiny, tiny fraction of most facebook groups is actually posting, commenting, or even viewing the group at any given moment. Most people who view don't post/comment. (True of reddit and other social media as well.)

            And the thing about poorly moderated groups (especially on platforms with rage-boosting algorithms) that let assholes go off without consequences is: the people who both a) actually look at the group ever and b) aren't assholes either leave entirely, stop looking at the group, and stop posting/commenting to the group (if they ever did in the first place). They go find places to hang out where there aren't a bunch of assholes. Nobody wants to hang out with the assholes when they can easily just not.

            And at the same time, the assholes all gravitate to the same few places because they get kicked out of all the other places. Or if they don't get kicked out outright, they get shouted down or ignored, which they hate. So instead they congregate where they can get away with or get praised for saying whatever vile things they want.

          • By stuaxo 2026-02-2212:03

            The Dunbar number is 150 for humans but that only measures maintaining a group, maybe the behave nicely number is smaller.

        • By graemep 2026-02-2211:00

          > But what I've noticed consistently is that any group on FB that has more than 1000 members will end up surfacing so much toxic sentiment that I have to unsubstantiated.

          It depends on the group and how well it is moderated.

          I live in an area where everything depends on Facebook. There are multiple FB groups for the town, the largest of which has 80k members. Not perfect, but not toxic. The same in other similar groups.

          I am an admin of another with 30k members. It has a tight focus (exams and qualifications for home ed kids in the UK - GCSEs/IGCSEs mostly, but other things too), membership is only for parents of such kids (there are membership questions), the group is private, posts require approval, irrelevant comments get deleted, repeat offenders get kicked out. We do not have a lot of problems (some attempts at spam by tutors, but they get kicked out).

        • By cyberge99 2026-02-211:11

          I think after a certain group size people feel immune or that their alternative thought might have a better chance of landing with someone.

        • By veunes 2026-02-2120:16

          Once a group gets big enough...

        • By derefr 2026-02-2121:161 reply

          > This has led me to a theory that humans just can't behave nicely beyond some threshold group size.

          I think you're generalizing far too broadly. The problem you're describing is more-or-less exclusively a problem with online, open-membership groups.

          Consider: if the groups you describe were in-person groups, these ranters would constantly be getting disengaged/off-put/disgusted reactions from the "silent majority" of the people in the group. And just these reactions — together with a lack of any positive engagement — would, almost always, be enough to make them stop or go somewhere else.

          (Or, to put a finer point on that: "annoyed, judgemental silence, and then turning away / back to the person you were talking to" would always put off the vast majority of people, with just a few — people who have trouble understanding non-verbal signals — persisting because they aren't "getting the message." And in an in-person context, these few would still eventually be taken aside and given a talking-to, because if they're butting into other in-person conversations with this behavior, they're being far more disruptive than "random new conversation threads" tend to be felt as. Even though "random new conversation threads" can kill a group just as dead.)

          The problem with decorum / respect-for-purpose in unmoderated online open-membership groups seems to mostly stem from the fact that people underestimate the importance of non-verbal signals in moderating/regulating behavior. And so there is a dearth of such signals available in such groups. Our brains didn't evolve to play the game of socializing without these signals, any more than ants evolved to coordinate without pheremones. So many people's brains begin to play the game in degenerate / anti-social ways.

          From what I've been able to gather, from personal interactions with many people who admit to being "Internet trolls" at some point in their lives... their behavior was almost never intentional maliciousness/active-disregard-for-others on their part. It's rather an emergent behavior — something they "just ended up doing" — given a lack of (non-verbal-signal-alike) calibrating feedback.

          And why is there so little non-verbal-signal-alike communication online?

          Well, for one thing, we often aren't even aware we're giving off such signals; and so, if we need to consciously choose to communicate them (as we do in online contexts), then we simply fail to do so, because the majority of these signals never even rise to our conscious attention as something to be communicated.

          And even when we do become aware of them, we often don't feel them to be important enough to be "worth" going to the effort of translating into some more conscious/explicit/non-subtextual form of communication.

          And then, even when a strong desire to communicate a nonverbal signal does bubble up within us... most online chat/forum systems are horrible at transmitting such signals with any degree of fidelity, when they transmit them at all. Especially the kinds of signals used for intra-group behavior regulation.

          Facebook, for example, has reaction emojis on both posts and comments — but no reaction emoji that transmits a sentiment like "I disapprove of you saying this; please stop" (e.g. U+1F611 EXPRESSIONLESS FACE or U+1FAE4 FACE WITH DIAGONAL MOUTH). Rather, the only reaction emoji available are those meant to react sympathetically to the emotive content of the post/comment — e.g. with anger, sadness, etc. (People do try to use the "anger" reaction to express disapproval of posts; but when the content itself is often "ragebait" / meant to evoke anger, the poster won't necessarily understand that these reactions are being directed at them, rather than at their post.)

          Further, no chat system or forum I'm aware of has participant-visible signals of "detach rate" — i.e. there's no way for people to know when others are clicking on their posts, reading one line, doing a 180 and running away as fast as they can. (YouTube videos expose this metric to their creators; I think it's actually very helpful for them. It could do with being implemented far more widely.)

          (And, to be a conspiracy theorist for a moment: I think, in both cases, this is probably intentional. The explicit purpose of signals that "regulate behavior", after all, is to make people engage less in certain anti-social behaviors. Making available any such tools, will therefore inevitably make any kind of platform-aggregate "engagement metrics" go down! If they were ever temporarily introduced, they'd have been quickly removed again with this justification.)

          • By graemep 2026-02-2211:121 reply

            Great analysis. I do not think its conspiracy theorist to believe it to be intentional, or at least a result of KPIs.

            One thing I think you are missing is that in person groups are usually far smaller. Anything with 1,000 people would be organised and there would be rules of behaviour, moderation of discussion etc. Most often if something is that big, its mostly an audience.

            I think the other thing that happens in real life groups is that there is no community or real relationships. If you annoy people in real life it has consequences. In an FB group there are none.

            • By derefr 2026-02-2321:00

              > One thing I think you are missing is that in person groups are usually far smaller.

              Yes, but — an online group with 1000 members isn't really equivalent to an in-person group with 1000 members. It's actually more equivalent in "activity" / "number of expected novel pairwise interactions" to an in-person group with, say, 150 members.

              (Why? Because the "members" of an online group, as reported by most chat/forum systems, are just the number of people with access to the chatroom/forum, or who are subscribed to updates to the chatroom/forum, etc. Most of these people have never posted. Many more have only ever posted once. Whereas, in common parlance, you wouldn't really describe someone as a "member" of an in-person group, unless they actually regularly attend the group's in-person meetings. [And that goes double for formal in-person organizations, which often have membership fees or dues. Nobody bothers paying to maintain membership to these if they aren't intent on attending!] So the word "members" here really refers to two very different metrics: for online, the number of passive readers; for in-person, some upper bound on the number of people you might expect to encounter at the average in-person event. We need to do some unit conversions here in order to make valid comparisons!)

              Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the average online group with 1000 "members" might have ~100 regular posters. (It's probably less, actually.) And let's also say that the average (geographically-based) in-person group with 150 "members", has events attended by ~100 people. And let's assume "regular posters" and "regular event attendees" are roughly equivalent in how they cause interactions that drive (dis)affection / (dis)engagement within the group.

              I believe we both already agree that an in-person group where events regularly see ~100 attendees, tends to do just fine without rules of behavior / explicit moderation / etc.

              And yet, it seems to me that an online group with "just" ~100 regular posters, almost always tends toward falling apart, unless it does have such rules, and moderation to enforce those rules.

              That's the more specific, apples-to-apples-ish distinction that I had in my head in my GP post: that it's weird that when we take basically the same "level of expected interactions" from in-person + synchronous, to online + asynchronous, that it tends toward a different equilibrium state.

              ---

              I do also agree with the lack of community / real relationships being a major driving factor. If you take a bunch of people who are already in the same community, and give them a closed-membership unmoderated online forum to speak in, the resulting interactions don't seem to tend toward awfulness/collapse nearly as badly.

              But I would argue that this isn't just due to "consequences" (i.e. posters knowing they're impacting their position in the equivalent real-world community.)

              Rather, I think a large part of what makes online forums "backed by" shared pre-existing communities more robust, is that the community provides its members with an implicit shared context for "recovering" an assumed set of nonverbal signals that "would go along with" others' textual wording choices... which in turn regulates behavior exactly as if those nonverbal signals were being explicitly communicated. People don't need to actually convey that they're frowning at you, if everyone in the community (including the poster!) knows exactly what subtextual meaning is carried by a reply of e.g. "Well bless your heart."

              This is a testable proposition: it implies that closed-membership forums "bound to" a community offer no benefit, if 1. the community itself is open-membership and 2. new people join the community itself frequently enough that few community resources are being invested per new member on giving them a thorough enculturation into the community (incl. awareness of the community's wording-subtext equivalences.)

              - So you would expect that, if there's an online community forum for e.g. a small village, where the only way to move there is to marry into an existing household there — then that forum will be robust and self-moderating, because every newcomer to that community gets a thorough dose of community enculturation.

              - Whereas, if there's an online community forum for e.g. the congregation of a church in a particular urban neighbourhood of a city, where anyone can just rent an apartment in the neighbourhood and start attending the church... then that forum might be quite awful, despite every member being aware that what they say there will impact how the congregation sees them. Because there's no enculturative "speed limit" preventing absolute newcomers from immediately posting in that forum.

      • By DeathArrow 2026-02-216:351 reply

        My Facebook feed is great, my X feed is great. I don't use Facebook and X because I like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk but because I genuinely read interesting things and I interact with people I like.

        That being said, I don't spend too much time on social networks because I have lots of other things to do.

      • By groundzeros2015 2026-02-210:422 reply

        [flagged]

        • By arcatech 2026-02-210:572 reply

          Sometimes you have to stand for something even if it’s inconvenient.

          • By jrumbut 2026-02-214:071 reply

            It's working too. All my friends stopped using Facebook for similar reasons. My feed went from a 24/7 pleasant reunion to a fetid swamp and now I also have stopped using it.

          • By groundzeros2015 2026-02-215:231 reply

            [flagged]

            • By happymellon 2026-02-216:361 reply

              > You also don’t systematically evaluate all CEOs of all products to use.

              We certainly evaluate companies on their CEOs if their CEOs make themselves high profile enough.

              You are certainly judged here if you have a Tesla because of Musk hence why sales have dropped 50%.

              Other companies that don't have as high profile CEOs can get away with terrible points of view.

              • By groundzeros2015 2026-02-216:421 reply

                Oh yeah? How is the ceo of your power company? Your refrigerator? Your garage door?

                I just am very skeptical any of this is based on a harm based model of morality. Instead it smells like concern about perception or status:

                > You are certainly judged here if you have a Tesla

                • By happymellon 2026-02-219:221 reply

                  > Other companies that don't have as high profile CEOs can get away with terrible points of view.

                  > > Oh yeah? How is the ceo of your power company? Your refrigerator? Your garage door?

                  If they hide their terrible opinions then its hard to made judgements.

                  • By groundzeros2015 2026-02-233:36

                    Exactly, so your morality is actually based on media prominence and status, not harm.

        • By cindyllm 2026-02-212:17

          [dead]

    • By curious_af 2026-02-2020:456 reply

      International flight attendant. So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary. If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that)

      What you're referring to may also be part of their XCheck program which came to light back in 2021

      • By Aurornis 2026-02-2021:075 reply

        > So the algorithms for people that travel internationally a lot are drastically different from the people who remain stationary.

        I can confirm the same experience as the parent commenter for my family who still use Facebook even though most of them don't travel internationally.

        > If Facebook wanted to prevent themselves from negative publicity, they might have a different experience for the people who have political power (international travel might be the best proxy for that)

        I think the much simpler explanation is more likely: People who use Facebook for engaging with friends and family content will see more friends and family content. I don't think this is Facebook playing 4D chess trying to hide content from politicians by detecting who is traveling internationally. I mean, if Facebook did want to have a separate algorithm for politicians, don't you think they could come up with something better than triggering on international travel?

        • By mayneack 2026-02-214:13

          I'd be shocked if international travel was the algorithmic tell, but in the book Careless People, the author discusses extensively that they (Facebook's political team) did a lot of manually curating the experience for politicians across the world to help push for Facebook's side in whatever issue was important on a given day.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People

        • By michaelt 2026-02-2111:02

          > I don't think this is Facebook playing 4D chess trying to hide content from politicians by detecting who is traveling internationally.

          I agree the triggering criteria isn't international travel - but giving VIP treatment to VIPs isn't "4D chess" it's just business as usual.

          You get elected to congress? The moment the list of winners comes out, someone from Comcast finds the accounts and marks them as VIPs. Someone at Uber does the same. Someone at Amazon does the same, and so on.

          Typically this will limit who in Customer Services can view the addresses on your account and reset your password. But it can also mean you get free upgrades, put you at the front of the queue, assign your orders to highly-rated workers, etc - or for social media, a curated experience making the site look classy and enriching.

        • By AlienRobot 2026-02-211:543 reply

          It would be very ironic if the reason people complain about Facebook so ardently is that they just didn't have enough friends IRL in first place to make Facebook work the way it should.

          • By Aurornis 2026-02-214:06

            I have one circle of friends who are barely online at all. Their phones exist for minimal e-mails and texts and that's it. A couple don't even have a dedicated internet connection at home. Their experience on Facebook wouldn't be good either.

            I do agree with your general sentiment, though: Many complaints about Facebook come from people who don't want to invest time into finding their friends online and engaging with friend content. They log in, see what the article sees, assume that's all there is, and abandon it. Most people just move on, but a few will complain about Facebook based on their limited experience from 10 years ago.

          • By xethos 2026-02-212:50

            I'd amend that as "didn't have enough [IRL] friends *on FaceBook* in first place", but that starts off a conversation about platforms being only-technically not required socially, network effects, etc.

          • By npodbielski 2026-02-2111:141 reply

            So you are saying that it is authors fault? How about not showing you shit instead when there is nothing else to show?

            It is like saying that in order to keep my e-mail inbox full and entertaining from now on your email provider will fill it with AI generated content. Madness.

        • By afavour 2026-02-2022:471 reply

          I do think it’s that but with a dangerous slippery slope embedded within. FB will optimize for engagement no matter what so if you linger on one political post they put among 99 friends and family posts they’ll immediately amp up the ratio. You need to somehow maintain a perfect ratio of time spent on FB to fresh family and friends content, otherwise FB will fill the space for you.

          My mother in law is an example of this. She’s always been “mildly” political, e.g. she liked Planned Parenthood’s FB page. Now her feed is a mess of anti-Trump stuff. I’m anti-Trump myself but a lot of these posts are barely coherent and she’s mentioned before now when she meets someone new her first thought is whether they voted for Trump or not. To my mind it’s a direct result of her slipping down that slope. She frequently has interactions (“fights” is too strong really) with friends and neighbors on her feed who are clearly off piste in the other political direction.

          I even had an example of it on my own profile. For some reason I had a post from a local (NY) radio station in my feed, about Mamdani. Curious to click into the comments I saw a cesspit of vitriol by boomer age users, attached to their real names, sometimes with smiling photos with their grandchildren… for weeks after whenever I logged in there would be a new post by a different conservative leaning radio station, ready to make me angry. Engagement > user happiness.

          • By Throaway1982 2026-02-214:09

            FB Marketplace makes you click on ads in order to tell the platform that you dont want to see that kind of listing anymore.

            Unfortunately, clicking on the ad alerts the algorithm, which then shows you MORE of that type of ad that if you had not clicked at all.

        • By fragmede 2026-02-214:41

          it's Facebook, and we've got AI. The "algorithm" is easily just a list of names to match, if they we're going to do that.

      • By bko 2026-02-2021:314 reply

        I think you're overthinking it. She probably just has a lot of real people connections and drives the algo to meaningful interactions. When a ghost logs in, they don't know what to show so default to "general" spam which is just AI generated woman.

        • By the_af 2026-02-212:29

          This is very likely.

          It reminds me of people who browse YouTube logged off: they see garbage, spam, rage bait, and sexy girls doing sexy stuff.

          But I browse logged in and my carefully curated subscriptions mean I mostly get good quality, relevant recommendations, and almost zero rage bait or outrageous stuff.

        • By twelvedogs 2026-02-2022:042 reply

          The algorithm is not optimised for meaningful interactions, even 10 years ago i couldn't get it to even mostly show friends and family after fighting it for a week

          • By HDThoreaun 2026-02-216:14

            The algorithm is optimized to show you content you tend to engage with. You couldnt get it to show you meaningful interaction because you didnt engage with it.

          • By blobbers 2026-02-210:33

            Do your friends and family interact on facebook? Could run an experiment to see if it adapts.

        • By blitzar 2026-02-219:27

          > When a ghost logs in ... so default to "general"

          I do this with youtube - and I get to see what is broadly popular.

          It is grim.

        • By kryogen1c 2026-02-212:36

          Lol! "Facebook's not bad, you're just a loser"

      • By duskwuff 2026-02-210:49

        I have a feeling it might be less "avoid negative publicity"; more "give a premium experience to influencers" (for a broad definition of that term).

        A user - like mbo's mother - who posts a lot of content which generates a lot of reposts and other positive interactions is basically a gold mine for Facebook. It's in their interest to treat that user with kid gloves to get them to keep posting, even if it means foregoing some revenue opportunities.

      • By underlipton 2026-02-2022:44

        I've been convinced for some time that access to some resource component that determines the quality of search/AI results is divvied up likewise. Why waste resources on users who have no audience or influence? If they're frustrated, who cares? Instead, identify the people who people already listen to, and make sure their experience with the platform is optimal. Even if the service is horrible for the vast majority of users, the gatekeepers and tastemakers will insist that they're just imagining things.

      • By 0x457 2026-02-2022:36

        Could it be due to someone actually using facebook so algorithm works in their favor. When I worked in REDACTED when you not frequent user you'd get generic "what is popular for everyone" feed because empty-feed = bad-feed.

      • By nindalf 2026-02-2023:38

        The XCheck program has nothing to do with anything you’re thinking of. You read some old misinformation and didn’t read the post debunking the misinformation.

        Source: me. https://nindalf.com/posts/xcheck/

    • By duxup 2026-02-2022:371 reply

      I logged out of facebook years ago only to find out an old friend / former coworker had died. Everyone knew, because of facebook, but not me :(

      It’s certainly the social hub for some groups.

      • By npodbielski 2026-02-2111:231 reply

        People with those kind of arguments always get from response that if you were not trying to keep in touch with this friend personally then it was not truly a friend. Facebook friends does not equal real life friend.

        • By iteria 2026-02-2113:191 reply

          I literally didn't learn that my own grandmother(I guess great aunt) had died until I happen to return home on the day the funeral was occurring. Everyone just assumed I knew because of Facebook and was there because of Facebook.

          Sometimes it's not about closeness. It's about people's expectations about how to communicate. My cousin was in no place to do anything but post to Facebook and then collapse. My sister helped him, but didn't think to tell me because you know Facebook. I live 4 hours away so I wouldn't have learned by osmosis.

          I have several stories of learning about deaths in the family way after the fact because my family is chronically on Facebook and I'm not. They all live in my hometown and it just doesn't occur to them to actually communicate with members like me who don't live there.

          This is basically why I haven't deleted my Facebook even if I don't often log in.

          • By npodbielski 2026-02-226:21

            I am sorry that it happened to you. Maybe I think that I have a solution because my wife tells me everything worth while from FB as the frequent user. Or maybe it is because I am not there at all which forces people to notify me directly by other means if necessary. Which is a problem for them but it is much a problem for me to keep in touch. So maybe if they feel some kind of symmetry in this it is fair to do it anyway to keep in touch? Anyway it is not like it is not solvable problem. People just do what they do because it is easier. Take that away and they will find another means.

    • By krn1p4n1c 2026-02-2020:441 reply

      My feed is like this too. I rarely use FB now, but I’ve aggressively pruned and blocked anything that becomes political or negative.

      • By fullstop 2026-02-2021:383 reply

        I unfollowed everyone except for a few family members. It really wants to give you the infinite scroll and started showing me some really bizarre stuff. So much AI slop, and random content.

        For about a week it kept showing me nursing mothers, no matter how many times I said "I don't want to see this" and blocking. I have no problem with women nursing, but these were done in a way to be sexually provocative.

        After that it started showing me AI houses and kitchens, with kitchen taps but no sink basin.

        I just gave up at that point.

        • By al_borland 2026-02-2021:54

          I made a Facebook account a few years ago for a private group related to a class I was taking. I didn't want to do this, but it is what it is.

          Being paranoid, I ran a VM just for Facebook. The browser never went to any other sites, so as far as I know there is no way it could track me or get any actual information about me, other than maybe a very rough location based on my IP. I also setup a burner email just for this and used a fake name/picture.

          On a fresh account with no info, my feed was much like that of the linked article. A bunch of thirst traps and various "news" and memes. Occasionally it would tell me to follow stuff so it could actually populate the feed, but when it wasn't doing that, it was giving me this kind of garbage. This was before the advent of generative AI, so I assume these were mostly real photos, but who knows who was actually behind those accounts.

          Twitter was fairly similar, but would show a lot of high school kids fighting or general street fights... along side the thirst traps.

        • By aembleton 2026-02-210:171 reply

          I can recommend using Social Fixer addon [1] on your laptop. On my phone, I use Nobook [2] which isn't quite as effective. They both do a good job though of removing loads of the useless stuff on Facebook.

          1. https://socialfixer.com/

          2. https://github.com/ycngmn/Nobook

          • By Fogest 2026-02-222:06

            Thanks for the suggestion, I just installed the socialfixer userscript and am going to give it a try. I now just need to start telling Facebook I'm not interested everytime I see an AI post and hope it eventually gets better.

        • By ricardobayes 2026-02-229:57

          I remember at some point which I think was a bug: it started showing a specific type of food, I think some kind of barbeque, prepared in various ways from across the globe. And by "started showing" I mean the feed was pretty much that for an extended period of time. Also at some point a large part of the feed was reposts of random reddit posts in screenshot format.

    • By wolvoleo 2026-02-211:48

      Facebook was this to me. Because I lived in many countries. Just seeing what my friends in other countries were experiencing <3

      But they blocked the old timeline where I could just see the updates from everyone I follow and nothing else. And replaced it with this feed with stupid influencer crap. Now I had to weed through all the shit to see what the people I care about were doing. It wasn't worth it for me so I left soon after, like a decade ago.

      Maybe they've rolled some of the crap back but it's too little too late for me.

    • By creddit 2026-02-2023:21

      Yeah I just logged in to see if it was really this bad an all I got were:

      (1) extremely, impressively relevant ads. (2) posts from people I know that were mostly nice except for my uncle who seemed to be posting nonsense.

    • By harrall 2026-02-211:23

      People say the same about Instagram but my feed is like all about making clothes, welding, construction stuff, funny memes, snowboarding, etc. It’s all good stuff.

      I just don’t interact with political content on social media — not because I’m apolitical but I don’t want to hear random people’s takes on matters.

    • By drnick1 2026-02-212:141 reply

      The privacy cost of Facebook is too high. Even if you have "nothing to hide" today, sooner or later you will post something you wish you had not posted, or someone else will do it for you. Once data about you is out there, it is impossible to remove, and the only recourse is to wait for that information to become irrelevant or outdated (if ever). For example, some employers have been known to spy on their employees through Facebook. Others have been harmed when searching for jobs because of things they posted on FB or other antisocial media, often long ago.

      Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of 1/2 of the planet, their children, pets, friends and family, in addition to their real-time location obtained through the spyware companion app. Not even governments used to have this kind of insight into people's lives not so long ago, and it is certainly very alarming that a spyware/adtech firm now does.

      • By randomNumber7 2026-02-218:502 reply

        > Facebook should not have multiple high quality photos of 1/2 of the planet, their children, pets, friends and family, in addition to their real-time location obtained through the spyware companion app.

        If adults decide to give them all this information aren't they the ones that should be blamed?

        • By defrost 2026-02-218:591 reply

          Perhaps, for the individual photos that each uploaded in ignorance of the bigger picture.

          But not for the aggregate warehousing, abuse of data, addiction maximising algorithmic design, insecurity, etc.

          That's all on Facebook and other similar mass scale "social' media behemoths.

        • By alex1138 2026-02-2116:09

          Facebook automatically tags people in photos

    • By hackernewds 2026-02-2117:381 reply

      Maybe you are too young to have noticed, but this is how Facebook used to be for every one. Until some a/b testing likely led to short term engagement boosts for news content and that's all you could see - especially during the 2016 news cycle with (allegedly Russian) political ads. Then people stopped posting, and others stopped posting, feedback loop and here we are.

      • By mgraczyk 2026-02-2117:412 reply

        This is lie, I was there and this is not at all what happened

        • By dang 2026-02-2119:201 reply

          I appreciate the voice of experience but if you're going to post a comment like this, could you please share some of that experience so we know at least some of what did happen?

          Otherwise it comes across as a drive-by swipe, which is a human reaction when you know that something on the internet is wrong, but which degrades the threads, partly because of the example it sets for others. The life of this community depends on knowledgeable people sharing some of what they know, so the rest of us can learn.

          https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

          • By mgraczyk 2026-02-2121:471 reply

            Fair and sorry about that

            Specifically what happened, and I think this is all public now is that prior to 2016 journalists and news organizations argued that Facebook was demoting news for various reasons. In reality it wasn't very engaging so it was automatically demoted. They promised to boost news more in early 2016, but largely as a result of worse engagement and negative experiences (arguing in comments) Facebook started ranking news worse than other content. This all happened in 2016, months before the general election

            And while Russia did run ads, it was mostly not political and the political content they ran had very little engagement. Russia mostly focuses on conspiracy theories and undermining American institutions. Facebook was aware of this in 2016 and certainly did not contribute to it intentionally, and I don't believe even by accident of some kind of misguided A/B testing

            The reason Facebook got worse for younger people is because younger people stopped posting.

            • By dang 2026-02-220:21

              Thank you! both for the kind response and the informative reply :)

    • By firesteelrain 2026-02-2114:36

      If it wasn’t for groups, events, and marketplace, I wouldn’t use FB.

      Marketplace has supplanted Craigslist near me.

      Events - no good replacement. Meetup isn’t as ubiquitous.

      Groups - nothing as good except maybe groups.io. But, that doesn’t have the same common folk. It’s still more niche.

      It could be that middle America is catching up where big city America has moved on. And maybe that’s the demographic that FB is serving now.

    • By wvenable 2026-02-2023:23

      My Facebook feed (I visit just for marketplace) is also not quite like the author's feed. I don't have a lot of AI content or thirst traps. I wonder if he's got some sort of the default young male algorithm experience.

      I wouldn't say my Facebook is good -- I don't interact with it enough for it to be anything.

    • By pavlov 2026-02-2023:412 reply

      My Facebook is honestly nice, it’s the most relaxing social media for me.

      The promoted posts are books and artists and occasional gym content. Ads are relevant or at least not annoying (SuitSupply seems to think I’m their ideal customer, and I don’t mind looking at their handsome models in this season’s knitwear). The people I know post mostly about meaningful or harmless stuff.

      But it’s probably like this because I joined over ten years after everyone else did. I didn’t activate my Facebook account until 2018 when I got a job at FB and it was mandatory. Then I found out that it was actually a good way to curate a set of people from my youth that I genuinely wanted to reconnect with.

      That’s probably what made the difference compared to many whose FB social graphs were built up early and never pruned.

      • By jcgrillo 2026-02-2023:561 reply

        Wow they make you use facebook at facebook? That's twisted. That would be like.. idk.. Phillip Morris making you smoke a pack a day.

        • By wedog6 2026-02-218:251 reply

          I believe it was somewhat like that at large cigarette companies in the heyday of smoking.

          An ashtray on every desk and throughout meeting rooms. Free packs of cigarettes you could grab anywhere in the building + a certain number of packs given to you weekly, with your preferred brand recorded. Some amount of social compulsion to smoke at work and during work related social events.

          • By codethief 2026-02-2113:02

            I hear it still largely is that way, though apparently they do try to avoid smoking in the presence of their pregnant coworkers these days. Progress! :-)

      • By actionfromafar 2026-02-210:09

        I laughed out loud. "I found that I loved Big Brother from my youth." Genuinely no offense meant, it was just funny.

    • By Aurornis 2026-02-2020:521 reply

      This is how my parents' Facebook feeds look, too. And my wife's. And my friends who still use it.

      I log in a couple times per year and see the same thing. It's nice to catch up with the friends who still use it.

      One thing I've noticed over the years on HN is that many of the people talking confidently about Facebook also start their posts with "I'm glad I deleted my Facebook account 8 years ago, but..." and then go on to describe what they imagine Facebook is like for everyone else, as pieced together through the type of sensational headlines that hit the Hacker News front page every day.

      There's another failure mode where someone tries to use Facebook but doesn't have any active friends on the site. They might scroll past photos from friends and family to click on ragebait links or engage with someone debating politics because they can't resist an internet argument. The algorithm takes note that this is what they engage with and gives them more of it, while showing less of the content they're scrolling past. Then they wonder why their feeds are full of topics that make them angry.

      There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to cleaning up your feed.

      Meanwhile, people like my parents and extended family treat Facebook like a friendly gathering where everyone knows discussions of politics and religion are off the table. They click "Like" on things they want to see more of. They leave nice comments under photos of their friends and family. Their feeds adapt and give them what they want.

      • By nephihaha 2026-02-2111:55

        I did delete a previous Facebook account, but got forced back into it due to work. I don't really use it for friends much now. It is much better as a result although I still see it trying to pull me one direction or another. I would happily delete the entire lot because I don't find it functional.

        "There's even an explicit feature to tell the algorithm what you want to see less of: You click the three dots and click "Hide post". They even have useful tools to unfollow people without unfriending them, which is highly useful for those people can't politely disconnect from but whose content you don't want to see. Using these tools even a little bit goes a long way to cleaning up your feed."

        I've really never liked that feature. It is what creates echo chambers, because you just get infinite agreemtn. For some reason, Faecebook only tends to show me one individual's posts over others. We're not unfriendly but not good mates. On the other hand thanks to the features you seem to be talking about, I get to hear about bereavements, birthdays, engagements etc days or weeks after they happened which is no use to me.

    • By shufflerofrocks 2026-02-2616:16

      I'm a 30 year old and I have a similar experience. Facebook has almost always been a pleasant experience for me - not just updates from friends but also the new stuff that comes in the feed, which is why I kept getting confused about the reports of fb being a hell hole, until I understood the rabidity & variability of their algorithm.

      FB Groups are one of the best corners of the internet imo.

    • By ksec 2026-03-015:21

      I am glad something great about Facebook is being voted on top on HN. Along with another day on post about OpenAI adopting Ads as revenue solution to problem.

      It shows the world is healing.

    • By vanjajaja1 2026-02-2111:26

      a common complaint about instagram is that you can no longer see your friends, just creators. i assume creators don't have this problem though, since they're having fun seeing all their creator friends

    • By nephihaha 2026-02-2111:46

      I have a Facebook friend similar to your mother. A solicitor (so makes a lot of money), off travelling to beautiful places much of the time.

      However, there is an element of one upmanship about social media. You see pictures of nice holidays abroad, nice cars and happy families... And then you find out some of the same folk are about to divorce or go bankrupt.

      The algo keeps showing me one person's feed but not others. I don't mind said person, but we are not close. Facebook tells me about birthdays, bereavements etc often two or three weeks after they happen which is no good.

    • By suzzer99 2026-02-210:59

      I have my Facebook feed curated enough that it shows me reels I like (landslides, dance-offs, kids or animals doing cute things - nothing salacious). Of course, AI crap filters in, but a majority are still good.

      Even the sponsored posts are very often interesting summaries of historical events or scientific wonders. They're AI most of the time, which goes on and on. So I read the first part and then go to wikipedia if I'm more interested.

      I'm also in a bunch of private groups that are spam-free. Some travel-related groups have turned out to be invaluable resources.

      So it does work if you train it on what you like.

    • By jasondigitized 2026-02-2020:371 reply

      Was she using the 'Friends' tab? Anything else is complete trash.

      • By bdangubic 2026-02-2020:42

        This is regular feed. I have another friend that is like OP's Mom, basically posts 4-10x per day. her main feed is basically just her and her friend's stuff, comments etc etc (few ads here and there of course but basically her feed looks like OG Facebook)

    • By tgma 2026-02-2021:57

      Could it be that the problem is users’ own interest in being outraged? A reflection of their mental state and anxiety that they then project to Facebook as if that’s the root cause.

    • By DeathArrow 2026-02-216:17

      I live in an European country where Facebook is used often and I can say I have my wall mostly filled with posts from people that interest me and that I interact with.

    • By shevy-java 2026-02-217:51

      Right. But who fits into that niche? I in general prefer privacy so I don't share fotos of whenever I take a du.. I mean do something semi-interesting to a grand selection of three or four other people out there (or more; but these are already reallife associations). Remote "relationships" rarely work in my experience, excluding a few that are important. But I don't see how that is any business of CIAbook to keep track of.

    • By rconti 2026-02-210:341 reply

      I always really enjoyed Facebook -- much more so than any other social media network. It was all friends, friends' content, and groups I was interested in and cared about. Sure it had ads, and a bit of suggested stuff, but mostly it was interesting content, no ragebait, no politics.

      But as those friends use it less and less, I use it less and less. And the less I use it, the more "suggested" crap I get. If I don't use it for a week, the site is absolute garbage.

      • By pants2 2026-02-210:441 reply

        To think I used to log in to Facebook every day, scroll friends' posts until it said "You're caught up!" then leave.

        That's almost unimaginable now, but I deeply wish I could return to that experience. Unfortunately as the suggested content got turned up, friends stopped posting, so even with all the browser extensions in the world I can't get that same experience back.

        • By rconti 2026-02-2119:46

          Yup. And unfortunately, I realized I've benefitted from the algo too. I tried the friends feed, and I ended up with MORE politics!

    • By nradov 2026-02-2118:051 reply

      My Facebook feed is also like that (although with more underwater pictures of fish). It seems fine. I don't think I'm particularly privileged. I honestly don't understand the hate that FB gets here on HN. Maybe some users are just following the wrong accounts?

      • By magicalist 2026-02-2118:23

        > I honestly don't understand the hate that FB gets here on HN. Maybe some users are just following the wrong accounts?

        Sounds like you do understand the hate but you don't understand how their feeds ended up different than yours?

    • By keyle 2026-02-210:162 reply

      And yet, every 3-4 posts, Facebook will start interjecting posts that are outrageous, meant to create response. If she interacts with any of those, e.g. even open it wide, or stay on it a long time, BAM, more of those posts next visits.

      And the cycle continues and grinds your account down to a complete hellish nightmare where you hate your city, your local councils etc. It's all a rigged platform for creating divide and hate. It drives clicks, it drives ads, it drives agendas.

      • By SpicyLemonZest 2026-02-217:33

        I don't think that's true. I just scrolled my feed really quick, and I had to get 23 posts down before I got an even mildly controversial post. The post wasn't even anything mean, it was a screenshot of an analysis showing that the richest Americans and the Americans who donate the most money don't overlap as much as you might think.

      • By dingaling 2026-02-217:42

        Nope, I've just opened FB in a tab. Top posts:

        - Chris Hadfield using a fire extinguisher to show how rockets work

        - A friend's trip to a gig

        - Video of a restored TWA flight engineer training simulator

        - Mountain weather for my region tomorrow

        - A rare colour photo of a 1930s biplane

    • By dawnerd 2026-02-2021:40

      I only use it for cruise groups and it’s been useful but once you scroll the main feed it’s baaad. Slop after slop. And what isn’t slop is rage bait short form content or bad takes or stolen videos from the vine days it feels.

    • By pyreko 2026-02-2020:465 reply

      I have this with Twitter surprisingly.

      I only use it for animal pictures, art, and to follow artists. I usually just use the Following page, but my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want. No weird right wing shit, no weird crypto shit, no drama or ragebait shit, etc... somehow.

      I know some day it'll break though.

      • By Aurornis 2026-02-2021:001 reply

        Same here. The trick is to unfollow people who start posting things you don't want to see in your feed any more. It sounds so simple, but many people treat their following list as an append-only log.

        I've followed accounts for hobbies that later spiral off into the deep end of Twitter's topics of the day, which is always my sign to unfollow them.

        Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.

        • By magicalist 2026-02-2118:34

          > Some people cannot resist clicking on things that make them angry, though. These websites continue serving up more of what you click on.

          "We're going to keep putting crap in front of you until we find something you click on. And even if you take a breath, don't reply and close it, we now know we have you and we'll keep showing that type of thing to you. Also, even though we're not going to tell you we're doing this, we and our power users are going to blame you for doing it to yourself. lol."

      • By numpad0 2026-02-2021:46

        Same. It feels like the real trick is to get platforms to think you're some kind of important person that could hurt the platform if served too much ragebaits.

        And it also feels like they're compelled to maximize ragebaits for some reason - maybe the Web2 is running out of "advertiser friendly" contents.

      • By suzzer99 2026-02-211:05

        For twitter I have a sports list that I stick to 99% of the time. A little politics filters through, but I've found that to be just the right amount.

        When major events happen, I switch over to my full feed, where I follow a bunch of political posters, and go into a blind rage in minutes.

      • By xeonmc 2026-02-210:13

            > my FYP is always just... animal pictures and art, exactly what I want.
        On Bluesky your feed will also have animal pictures and art, just not the kind you wanted.

      • By raincole 2026-02-2021:201 reply

        I have an account to follow artists on X. Surprisingly, it never pushes even one single blatant AI artist to my feed (not saying I'm an expert to recognize AI-generate artworks, but I've done digital painting as a side gig and.) There might be some paintover or more subtle ones that eluded my radar, but I've never seen the typical AI styles on my timeline.

        However, if you check posts remotely related to the US politics the reply section is out of control.

        I honestly believe out of Reddit, Facebook, Bsky and X, X is the one with the most reasonable timeline algorithm[0]. Reddit and Facebook are unusable except for very specific reasons (asking questions in certain apps' subs/groups). Most people I know irl moved to instagram though.

        [0]: Bsky is the worst, but interestingly if you use a third-party feed like 'For You' it's on par with X, just less traffic.

    • By AlexandrB 2026-02-2020:31

      > all the Facebook PMs intended

      That's being awfully generous. I think Facebook PMs intend your feed to be filled with valuable commercial offers that can be monetized by Meta.

    • By veunes 2026-02-2120:13

      Your mum's experience is probably what FB is best at: high-trust network, lots of original photos, lots of comments from real friends

    • By cyanydeez 2026-02-2021:48

      The skeptical observer would suggest because her demograph votes, serving ads which benefit Facebook shareholders is good for business.

    • By moduspol 2026-02-2020:332 reply

      They should offer that privilege to the rest of us for a few bucks a month. I'd probably pay.

      • By Aurornis 2026-02-2020:561 reply

        You don't need to pay anything. That's just how Facebook works when you have active friends on it and you engage with their content.

        I do find it interesting that tech people are so baffled when other people enjoy Facebook and derive value from it. I think we see so many exaggerated headlines about algorithms and feeds that people who don't use the site have a very different idea of what people who do actually use the site are seeing.

        • By CosmicShadow 2026-02-2021:321 reply

          Yet my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open to people and bands she wants updates from because Facebook refuses to put them on her feed, despite her commenting on every post and story from them; she instead gets all these random shitty "suggested" posts from things that she would never have interest in or actively hates and FB should know that. She constantly mutes and reports shit. I get the same thing, but I don't use FB nearly as much. Those same bands have to spam repeatedly because despite having tens of thousands of fans they show everyone that their posts are only shown to 16 people. It's a shit site that maybe works for some folks, but not at all for us active or not.

          • By JCattheATM 2026-02-210:561 reply

            > my wife uses it daily and has to keep 16 separate tabs open

            Surely she could just bookmark those pages and check periodically, or subscribe to a newsletter or something?

            • By CosmicShadow 2026-02-211:21

              She checks them every time she's on her computer, no point in closing them and they are always posting to social media every day, whereas you may get a generic email once a month if they even have a mailing list. Instagram is admittedly a LOT better at showing what you want than FB, as she follows them all there as well, but sometimes they post different stuff on each. She wants to both support and help these bands and band members by engaging on their socials so they actually get shown to more people. These are metal bands, so not big by any means, although some of them are still "large" or well known in their genres, but still struggle to get any good traction online. Most people in metal bands still have full time jobs, even if they are at the top of their genre (excluding the mega bands people have heard of).

      • By cameldrv 2026-02-2020:351 reply

        The problem is that your friends probably don't post much to facebook, and so they'd show you that, and you'd get to the end and find something else to do, so they have to bulk it up. There is a "friends" feed that's buried under a couple of menus that does this though.

        • By moduspol 2026-02-2020:393 reply

          I wouldn't mind seeing an empty feed that says, "your friends didn't post today," or whatever. They have to fill the feed because I'm not paying them and they need the engagement.

          But if I were paying them, even a little bit, then maybe they could. But I didn't know there was a friends-only feed so I'll check that out.

          • By Digit-Al 2026-02-2021:14

            If you are on the mobile app, click on the burger menu and select "Feeds". You will then have a page that has tabs at the top. "All" will be selected by default, but if you select "Friends" you will see only posts from your friends. If you have completely caught up it will be empty and will say that you have caught up and seen everything your friends have posted. There are still ads, but you don't get all the reels, and crap posted by people you don't know.

          • By AndrewDucker 2026-02-2021:08

            Go to the "feeds" page and select "friends".

          • By wedog6 2026-02-218:26

            You wouldn't mind, but Facebook would mind though.

    • By motbus3 2026-02-2218:38

      Makes sense to me. Seems to be using as it was supposed to be.

    • By Sharlin 2026-02-219:161 reply

      My FB experience is still fine after all these years. I can't find anything in my feed that isn't either a post a) to a group I'm in, b) by a page I follow, or c) by a friend. These days, a) and b) make up the majority of posts – many of the groups have no equivalent elsewhere and are a major reason why I still use FB. Even the reels/shorts/whatever that FB suggests are mostly nice and relevant – cats, trains, music. No slop, no thirst traps, no politics beyond what I choose to follow, not even ads because those are blocked.

      Honestly, I've been wondering what other relevant social media there even is for someone like me, an early 40s millennial. Twitter I refuse to use, and nobody's on Bluesky. Instagram is… fine, I guess, and more lively and "feel-good" in some sense, and also used by the younger folk, but there's less "engagement" beyond liking something and scrolling on. On Facebook comments and actual conversation are in a much bigger role, at least for me. Reddit is great, assuming you curate your subreddits, but I don't have friends there.

      • By nephihaha 2026-02-2111:491 reply

        I think you are very lucky. I get constant political messaging (not from one side of the room either) which is very unsubtle and biased. I get a lot of slop suggested.

        I have never used Instagram and don't plan too. Twitter has always been a disaster and a mob mentality, and now it barely shows me stuff I want to look at.

        • By Sharlin 2026-02-2112:23

          I wonder if the politics issue is just much worse in certain parts of the world. Nobody bothers to spend money trying to influence the population of a small Nordic country.

          As an experiment, I disabled Ghostery and uBlock, and the feed became about 33% ads, which is rather annoying, but the ads were mostly fine. There was one obvious AI slop image advertising a dating site, and one cryptobro ad, but otherwise they were fairly reasonable, relatively speaking.

    • By RoyTyrell 2026-02-2316:02

      My FB is generally like that. However I have noticed I see more more delayed posts from friends, and it's starting to recycle posts from friends I've seen already. I'll see a friend post pics of a vacation they took but I won't see that post for 3-5 days, and in the mean time I'll see some other old posts from them that were from 1-3 weeks ago come up multiple times.

      Occasionally I do get blasted with AI slop and random accounts for a few days. When that happens I keep selecting to stop showing me that because I'm not interested.

      I join groups for my interests. I never interact with random groups that pop up. I'm pretty diligent about scrolling past ads and I report a ton of them that are AI bs or selling lies (like "tonics" that cure cancer).

    • By harel 2026-02-218:59

      That's almost me. I've always used Facebook as a tool to keep in touch with friends around the world. My friend list is 95% people I know in real life. A small fraction of them still posts. I also get a lot of slop in between. The filler posts. I am waiting for a Facebook resurgence or a Friendster comeback.

    • By scotty79 2026-02-219:57

      At one point I subscribed to groups on Satisfactory, Factorio and RimWorld and while I don't play much anymore it's always nice to see posts on my feed made by people engaged with these games.

      When algorithm doesn't have a handle on you it puts you at the bottom of the barrel that's filled with slop.

      I think the problem is Meta doesn't moderate algorithm enough so a lot of users have terrible experience becausd they don't moderate their feeds themselves.

      Most people are not self-aware enough to decide that maybe political rants is not the healthiest content to consume. And even if they do, tools for moderation are not easily accessible enough. There should be a huge "Yeah, I hated that." button on each post.

    • By BorisMelnik 2026-02-2117:21

      came here to say this also...also on mobile there is a feed that only shows your friends, no "algo." my parents are both on FB and pretty much only interact with their freinds. it is quit beautiful.

    • By newsclues 2026-02-2021:37

      You keep the content creators happy.

    • By SecretDreams 2026-02-2022:35

      Facebook used to be like this when it was only for college students. That was the last time Facebook was good.

    • By derefr 2026-02-2120:54

      Interesting.

      So the presumption, then, would be that Facebook only turns on the slop-content hose to "fill the void" on many people's dashboards from a lack of organic content from people they follow? I.e. that if you were personal friends with enough other frequently-posting Facebook users, the slop-content would disappear?

    • By kmeisthax 2026-02-2117:31

      I would love to know what kind of ascetic mental training you have to do to get your Facebook feed to just send you actual people you know and not... well, the slop trough.

    • By troupo 2026-02-2114:52

      I don't use Facebook much, and my feed is filled with algorithmic bullshit and almost no posts from friends, family, or groups I'm a part of.

    • By KPGv2 2026-02-214:36

      For the longest time, that was my feed, well after most Millennials had moved on. It was spectacular.

      But I finally decided I didn't want to doom scroll so much, and when I changed phones, I declined to install the app on my new one, and I logged out on my laptop.

      So I almost never am on anymore, and it's always complete trash. Zuck's Trump turn helped the inertia, and now with the revelations that he was trying to party with Epstein how can I even log in anymore?

      I think I'm going to reach out to the people who matter and get their email addresses, then hang my FB shoes up for good, twenty-one years after I joined.

  • By jedberg 2026-02-2020:2942 reply

    > So: is this just something wacky with my algorithm?

    No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

    Some other interesting points: A woman posted on reddit recently saying she noticed her son's feed was filled with this stuff, so she created her own instagram account, identified as a man, and had the same feed. No matter what she did she couldn't fix it. She asked other women about this, and they all said their partner's feeds were the same.

    This is not a problem for women. At least not one I've ever talked to or read about on the internet.

    Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.

    I got a whole bunch of thirst traps again.

    It doesn't bother me anymore, I just tune it out and scroll past it because my feed still has the parenting and pottery too, and my friend's updates, which is what I'm there for.

    But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.

    • By munificent 2026-02-2022:474 reply

      I just tried to repro this.

      On my Facebook account, I scrolled through 30 posts without seeing anything thirsty. Mostly synthesizer stuff, stuff for my kids' schools, and a few posts from friends. It definitely knows I'm male because the ads are for men's apparel.

      Instagram was the same.

      I never ever watch reels or other short form video, so maybe that has something to do with it.

      • By thephyber 2026-02-215:081 reply

        You didn’t try hard to repro it.

        Facebook uses your likes / groups / searches to customize your feed. If are active and don’t delete your old content, you have already trained FB to avoid the thirst traps for your account.

        The article author said he was off-site site for 8 years, so FB was offering him random high engagement content to stuff his feed so he didn’t reach the end.

        • By throwaway290 2026-02-218:231 reply

          he is replying to

          > Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

          if meta identifies him as guy and he don't get a thirst trap after a minute then it's totally not "almost exclusively thirst trap".

          • By trymas 2026-02-2111:261 reply

            Though OC also said:

            > Another point: I tried very hard to fix this at one point. I went through instagram and hit like on nothing but pottery and parenting videos. For about a week I had a feed that looked like my wife's -- pottery and parenting. And then it reverted.

            So I guess it depends how active you are? My speculation would be (that would match the article) - if facebook figures out you’re a man, but you don’t actively like and engage with specific topics - it will default to AI thirst trap slop.

            • By NewsaHackO 2026-02-2111:483 reply

              No, if he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years, then looks at pottery for a couple of weeks, the algorithm correctly identifies that he isn't really into pottery and corrects back.

              • By throwaway290 2026-02-2113:12

                Yep. It's far from "it knows you're male => it gives you thirst traps non stop"

                But also I will say that curating algo feed to show what you want is annoying and ultra frustrating, whenever it goes off the rails it makes me want to quit.

              • By trymas 2026-02-2114:34

                > he's been looking at material that indicates an interest in thirst trap stuff for years

                N is obviously too small to get anything meaningful, though article was about the same problem and article’s author haven’t visited facebook for 8 years…

                Cannot say about FB or IG, but on Youtube I get way too many “AI girlfriend” ads or video recommendations. I report as many as I can and my subscription channels are as far away from such topics as it can be. Thus I totally understand OC and article’s author.

              • By jedberg 2026-02-2117:541 reply

                Except that I am into pottery, and I'm a parent into parenting stuff. But instead of just liking the stuff it was showing me, I made the extra effort to seek out that content and like more of it in an attempt to train the algo.

                Also, as I mentioned elsewhere, this problem only started about two years ago, and I've had instagram for 15 years. So either they did something differently, or suddenly there was a lot more of that content, but I didn't change my habits.

                Also, as a funny side note, scrolling my feed this morning was suddenly thirst-trap free for the first time in years.

                • By NewsaHackO 2026-02-2118:41

                  I don't have an Instagram, so maybe they did change their algorithm recently. However, remember that the whole concept of "training the algorithm" and "not wanting to mess up your algorithm" has been a common saying for years at this point. Unfortunately, this is against what the social media companies actually want, which is more engagement. So they start to look at other factors that are more difficult to game. For instance, it may have noticed that you linger at images of thirst traps more than other images it shows. In fact, it may notice that while you are purposely liking pictures of pottery and parenting, the actual pictures that you are liking have both thirst trap qualities and pottery/parenting qualities. Not accusing you of anything, just saying that that is the pattern they use because they know that overtly liking thirst trap pictures may be frowned upon.

      • By jedberg 2026-02-2023:251 reply

        It's happens in the reels. I don't really see thirsty posts in my feed either, just people I follow for the most part.

        • By munificent 2026-02-212:11

          Yet another reason to avoid attention-span-destroying short form video. :)

      • By disillusioned 2026-02-215:04

        If you click Search in Instagram, what's it show you by default, before you enter a search term?

      • By martin82 2026-02-248:08

        I have scrubbed my account completely clean years ago and never use it for anything. When I log in once a quarter or so, just to check if someone sent me a message via the Messenger, all I see is soft-porn on my timeline.

    • By 3RTB297 2026-02-218:561 reply

      Also can confirm. From the first moment I started an IG account (at my wife's request), the default algorithm was to give me almost exclusively thirst trap posts with zero geographic or other relevance to me. I had to weed through thirst trap accounts that were brought up before hers - when searching by user name.

      I took a few minutes a day to search for cat pictures and cooking videos, and sharing cat videos with my spouse (her reason for using IG). It was a fight, but after a few days the thirst trap suggestions immediately flipped to giving me stuff I can look at in public and not feel like a massive creep. There was a long tail, with occasional "....are you sure?" suggestions, but at this point a couple years of carefully reinforcing the same stuff seems to have overwhelmed the thirst trap suggestions.

      • By npodbielski 2026-02-2111:301 reply

        The sole reason for not using those sites is the whole knowledge that you have to do this crap.

        • By s1mplicissimus 2026-02-2511:171 reply

          Yea I wonder why people are willing to jump through such hoops, but to each their own I guess

          • By 3RTB297 2026-02-2511:25

            I use it maybe twice a week. My wife maybe every day or two, and will go through things if they make her laugh. Apparently she never got thirst trap hunky dudes non-stop when she first signed up.

    • By bityard 2026-02-2021:381 reply

      Can confirm. For as long as I've been on facebook (way over a decade now), I've only used it to share pics of my kids/pets to family/friends. I unfollow people who post political and other garbage content. And yet, my feed is nothing but ads and Reels of young women bouncing on trampolines in bikinis.

      • By mrweasel 2026-02-2111:073 reply

        One thought I've had is that it has to do with your level of engangement. If like me you doesn't really use social media for more than a few minutes a day (in my case I count Snapchat and YouTube Shorts, because that's what I have), then you start seeing some a lot of boobs.

        It seems like the algorithm panics, because you don't engange with anything much, or because your interests shifts to often and it can't deal with it. So it falls back to boobs.

        There's also a sad trend of assuming that because you're into lifting, your also misogynistic. The more you engange with fitness content, even if it's training programs or how to correctly do certain exercises, platforms like YouTube will start flinging misogynistic content at you and it's incredibly hard to remove.

        • By NewsaHackO 2026-02-2111:521 reply

          The issue is that they are very smart/subversive; they definitely track the amount of time you spend looking at certain pictures vs. others. So while you may be careful not to directly engage with certain material, if they noticed that you pause a little more at certain pics than others, and there is a pattern in the common topic in the pictures that you pause at, they use that information to create your interest profile.

          • By pityJuke 2026-02-2112:32

            This is it - you’ve got to be deliberate in scrolling immediately past anything remotely thirst-trappy, otherwise the algorithm hyperfixates. And then overstay your welcome at the type of content you want to see.

            In my experience, it has worked (my discover page is an amalgamation of classic Simpsons, Dropout.tv, and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, while my Reels feed is unhinged in the right way.) But also I’ve stopped using it because my brain was melting.

        • By j-bos 2026-02-2111:571 reply

          > The more you engange with fitness content, even if it's training programs or how to correctly do certain exercises, platforms like YouTube will start flinging misogynistic content at you and it's incredibly hard to remove.

          That explains why out of no where I got reccomendations for some gender conflict greentext channel, I had just that week been looking for lifting techniques.

          • By mrweasel 2026-02-2112:381 reply

            Yes, I get those as well. Happens everything I've been looking a lifting videos for a day or two. Give it a bit more time and you'll get videos of right wing women explaining why modern women can't get dates.

            It is fairly concerning and there's not real good way of telling YouTube that you're not interested. The dislike button does little and blocking the channel is also pretty ineffective as there are a myriad of channels with the similar content which you'll just be served instead.

            • By j-bos 2026-02-2115:43

              So I've actually had great results by hitting not interested on all such videos. Youtube is actually my favorite algo because barring unexpected pipelines like fitness to red pills my home feed is 90% things I consider worth watching, assuming infinite time of course.

        • By bityard 2026-02-2318:40

          TIL that the lowest common denominator for engagement on the Internet is boobs. Ha!

          Anyway, I know exactly what you mean. I have certainly seen YouTube pigeonhole me into a demographic that I'm not even remotely part of. One day I watched some ham radio-related content and then a couple of rugged flashlight reviews and YT decided I was a tacticool doomsday prepper would NOT stop suggesting videos about conspiracy theorist podcasts and how to make guns at home.

    • By rconti 2026-02-210:351 reply

      I've been a male (it's in my profile!) for all 22 years (yikes) I've been using facebook. I don't get that stuff.

      • By eek2121 2026-02-212:482 reply

        There is definitely more to this. I’ve been on Facebook since it opened up to the public, and they know for a fact that I am a guy.

        I literally only use it to communicate with family. I logged in today on both desktop and iOS, and the only thing I saw were updates from friends/family that I personally know.The only AI things were from a nerdy friend that created/shared/disclosed of it being AI, the rest was real stuff that I already knew about.

        If users are seeing this, it is more likely something to do with settings, Facebook not knowing anything about you, or some other mechanism.

        I am absolutely not holding them blameless, I am saying: compare notes and identify the actual problem, because I know a lot of folks using Facebook, and from conversations I had in the past hour or two, none of them see any of that, so there is likely something else going on.

        • By steezeburger 2026-02-213:361 reply

          I think they definitely track how long you stay on something as you're scrolling. They show an attractive woman doing your hobby, then it just keeps going.

          • By j-bos 2026-02-2111:58

            Yeah it's an optimized skinner box. Any reaction above baseline is sure to be registered and reinforced.

        • By walt_grata 2026-02-2122:51

          They aren't blameless, friends and family only should be the default even if you don't engage much. Why would they default it to a bunch of junk.

    • By disillusioned 2026-02-215:041 reply

      Just click search on Instagram and BAM, thirst trap central. Don't have to have ever interacted with ANY of them, liked any of them, or follow anything CLOSE to that content, it's coming for you if you're a male between the ages of 18-99 that, presumably, the algo thinks is straight-leaning.

      My _feed_ on Instagram is a bit more curated and sticks closer to that curation: weird music stuff, weird instrument stuff, and because I show my daughter a lot of it, Broadway musical stuff/BTS content/other actually interesting/cool stuff. So generally speaking my IG feed is curated and good. My FB feed is still trash; it feels like it casts a much wider net, but I've also been proactively following accounts that interest me on IG and don't do that much at all on FB (except some stand up comedians, since the format is actually really good for casual bite-sized scrolling).

      But IG search... woooooo boy, it's _wild_. I have to hide my phone away from my daughter when I'm trying to pull up a specific account because the search interface is completely bikini-clad crazy thirst content. And again, I've literally never engaged or interacted or even really _lingered_ on any of those posts. It just goes for it.

      • By wedog6 2026-02-218:351 reply

        One of the creepiest aspects of this is that the 'thirsty content' is mainly mainly AI-generated pictures by spammers who know what they are doing, but also includes 'correlated' posts by normal users.

        Eg you have a 15-year-old daughter and post a picture of her smiling in school uniform on Instagram because it's her birthday or something. The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.

        • By alsetmusic 2026-02-2118:201 reply

          > The algorithm takes that post and shows it to randomly selected men who often interact with pictures of attractive female teenagers, even though none of your other posts get shared like this outside of your connections.

          What evidence suggests this?

          I don't use any Meta services and I absolutely hate them and consider them evil. I know they do awful, terrible things and if someone has evidence of this I will believe it given Meta's track record. But this is far enough outside my current understanding of the awful things that they do, or people claim they do, that it needs a source.

    • By elAhmo 2026-02-2021:53

      I get similar ads in Youtube Shorts. It was appearing only when I was abroad, and I was curious to see what is triggering it, it was mostly: male, 18+, location in country X. Same happens now in a country where I live.

      Most of the reported ads don't get taken down by Google, although they are very obviously AI porn ads.

    • By slibhb 2026-02-2117:06

      Is it because "Meta identifies you as a male" or because men look longer at sexy pictures of women? I assume Meta has some heuristic to determine how long you look at items in their feed even if you don't click anything.

    • By pwrsysengineer 2026-02-2022:542 reply

      I created a Facebook account a few years ago to get in on the local marketplace deals. After opening the website a few times and seeing very suggestive content, I had the idea of tailoring my feed to the most racy things I could find. Eventually, my feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits and in suggestive positions, censored images of sexual acts, and AI generated images of elderly women with large breasts and little clothing. I was taking screenshots for a while but one time I opened my photo gallery while on the train and realized how embarrassing it looked to have a phone filled with this crap. Edit: Used more respectful language

      • By xethos 2026-02-212:581 reply

        > my feed was filled images of children wearing bathing suits and in suggestive positions

        > I was taking screenshots for a while

        More than a little surprised this seemed like a good idea at the time, let alone that you did so for a while without thinking "There is no scenario this ends well"

        • By pwrsysengineer 2026-02-213:292 reply

          It does sound bad, and yes I deleted them. I wanted to convince my friends at Meta of what I was seeing. They didn't believe me until I showed them.

      • By someotherperson 2026-02-212:471 reply

        Yeah you should probably delete those photos. Nobody is going to believe your story (myself included).

        • By replwoacause 2026-02-214:24

          The part of the story I believe is the part about basically half naked children on Facebook, whether real or AI. I haven't put anything on my profile for the algorithm to tailor content to, since it's used for only marketplace and I've seen some very disturbing content that looked like it slithered off of X. It was as suggestive and inappropriate as you could be about kids, without being full-on porn. And Facebook/Meta seem to have no problem with it. It's a trash heap of a site and everyone involved with it working at Meta should be ashamed.

    • By Nursie 2026-02-212:47

      > no matter what you do

      I made them go down markedly by setting my age to be over 100. Doesn’t stop some of the thirst trap ‘reels’, but all the “Asian women would like to get to know middle aged guys like you!” bullshit went away.

    • By gcanyon 2026-02-2117:20

      Facebook knows I'm male, and I see things like this very rarely -- on the order of one or two a month. Maybe that's FB ('s algorithm) testing my "defenses": they/it show me something like that as an experiment, and if I ever clicked on it, the floodgates would open.

      But I don't, so it doesn't. Or maybe FB knows I'm happily married and that won't work on me in the first place.

      Or maybe FB knows I'm a sucker for chess and go puzzles, so they're my equivalent of this?

    • By brational 2026-02-2021:57

      ha.. I was about to type this exact paragraph. my instagram has no human connections, I only follow local business (food, bars, museums/gardens, non profits, etc) so I can be aware of specials & things. I have no followers. I don't really like anything but clearly engage with cooking stuff, funny animal videos, comedy in general. Multiple languages. lots of crossover.

      Honestly it's a pretty great instagram experience.

      And yes I'm a middle aged male so no matter what the smut comes back (at least I get it in multiple languages too?)

    • By grishka 2026-02-2113:012 reply

      > Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.

      What if you're gay though. They have to be able to detect that somehow too

      • By alsetmusic 2026-02-2118:10

        Then they'd undoubtedly show you hot guys. I don't know why this wouldn't be the obvious answer.

      • By Xenoamorphous 2026-02-2113:391 reply

        Probably still a relatively small percentage of the total for them to care.

        • By steve_adams_86 2026-02-2117:18

          My understanding is that it's likely somewhere around 7.5% for men and women. Including bisexual people brings it closer to 10%. That's based on self-reporting, I think. I'm not sure how significant that would be in Meta's world.

          Among men this would only be 3 or 4%. Probably not that significant given how coarse the strategy itself is.

    • By dagurp 2026-02-2023:221 reply

      I don't get anything like that. Just memes and people complaining about dog poo

      • By jedberg 2026-02-2023:272 reply

        Are you looking at your feed or the reels? It happens in the reels (and on Instagram if you go the search page, most of the suggested items are thirsty)

        • By GreenDolphinSys 2026-02-214:131 reply

          That may apply to a vanilla account, but if your account is old, then that's just the kind of stuff you click like on, dwell on, bookmark, etc. We have to consider that these men may not be honest about their activity as well.

          The search and reels page just shows you what you interact with, and in my experience it tends to overreact to recent input. Look at a couple cat reels for example, and the very next or so refresh will have more cat reels.

          • By jedberg 2026-02-214:18

            My Facebook account is 21 years old and my Instagram is probably 15 years old.

            This problem only started about two years ago. I didn’t change my behavior.

        • By dagurp 2026-02-2313:18

          The feed. I almost never look at reels.

    • By dunham 2026-02-210:43

      I commented on a relatives post about a giant zucchini, and started getting posts about zucchinis in my feed. A couple of years ago, Facebook noticed that I stopped scrolling for calvin and hobbes comics and started showing me a bunch of those for a while.

      I finally got the deletion thing to not error out and am almost at the end of the 30 day deletion period.

    • By eek2121 2026-02-210:181 reply

      Are we using 2 different versions of Facebook? I get nothing except content from my friends. None of it is AI generated. I just logged in because the article was a bit disturbing. The only AI content I found was the small amount a couple of my friends generated, and it was clearly marked as such.

      • By jedberg 2026-02-210:25

        Based on the upvotes my comment got and the replies, it looks like most people get the experience in the article, and a lucky few don't. Looks like you're one of the lucky few!

    • By chasd00 2026-02-2022:29

      i rarely log into facebook too but i do use marketplace. I just pulled it up on my phone, the "reels" thing was all AI + thirst traps just like you described but the rest of my feed was pretty plain vanilla posts from friends/family i follow + some ads.

    • By AlexandrB 2026-02-2020:35

      Meta rediscovering the age-old adage that "sex sells". The core concept is little different than old car commercials featuring scantily clad women but with the plausible deniability of an algorithm so Meta can wash their hands of any negative consequences.

    • By andai 2026-02-2114:52

      I have the same thing on YouTube. I usually use adblock but I used youtube without adblock recently and was startled by the ads. It's either "AI girlfriend", or video games, or video games about AI girlfriends. (I don't play video games, and I'm not interested in AI girlfriend. At least Meta shows me ads about stuff I actually find interesting!)

      But my experience is constantly interrupted by images of scantily clad AI generated women. I'm no prude but it seems more than a little inappropriate to me.

      Oh yeah and the other 10% of the ads are about exploding children.

      I think I am going to install Adblock again...

    • By sershe 2026-02-211:32

      I feel like for me (a man) algorithm is super sensitive to engagement. If I er I mean my friend would look at these thirst traps, I er I mean my friend would have feed 90% full of them. On the other hand if I watch anything else I get none, and instead it's 90% epoxy table making, home inspection fails, rats solving puzzles, climbing videos or whatever it is I watched. Seems like mixing it up would be better, I can only watch so many rats solving puzzles.

    • By throwaway290 2026-02-218:20

      This is really false. I will join the chorus of others and say i don't get that stuff in my feeds. Although maybe meta doesn't identify me as guy

    • By chupchap 2026-02-211:46

      I was able to tame it on Instagram by actively blocking 3-4 accounts every day and then engaging with accounts of just one topic; I picked Cricket. That said, I don't use the discovery section much so when I revisit after a few weeks it resets to filth. So the way it works is if I go to the discovery tab and like a couple of random cricket videos. It keeps it sane to an extent. Facebook is a different story though

    • By grogenaut 2026-02-2118:43

      Mine started as women with ample posteriors at hockey games but quickly switched to police arguing with people and really sick ski and snowboarding videos. The police stuff is trailing off.

      I do ski patrol, guess it thought, a ski cop, I liked cops and skiing. Oh I was also getting a lot of ai generated bane videos. Felt sorry for that guy, judge was real inhumane to him.

    • By the_af 2026-02-211:21

      > No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

      This isn't my experience at all. I get "sexy girls" reels, but infrequently and that's it. No other "thirst traps" at all, most of my feed is relevant to my interests too. Been on fb for many years now.

    • By is_true 2026-02-2117:23

      They might have multiple types of men because it only shows me all kind of outdoor activities + construction tips

    • By htrp 2026-02-2023:26

      it's unfortunately not just your algorithm, but the views and likes of people who match your demographic specs....

    • By kccqzy 2026-02-212:24

      I don’t understand. What you describe is foreign to me. My Instagram only has posts from people I follow, as well as generic ads like newspapers. I have not seen any of these thirst trap posts (not that I would find these posts appealing; they aren’t my type anyways).

    • By alecco 2026-02-2110:551 reply

      I just tried this: browse YouTube with incognito and watching 3 engineering vids only (Veritasium, Real Engineering, and Practical Engineering).

      The home page shorts are about 50% thirst traps. There is creepy stuff, click-bait, and American politics/news (for and against Trump).

      The worst one is a short "this is why ram costs $900" by "discord memes" showing a young girl with revealing clothing. Almost 1 million views.

      I closed my YouTube account years ago because it was just pissing me off.

      • By me4502 2026-02-2111:31

        I feel this issue has started to slowly become worse and worse as we've been able to build better "preference profiles" based on small amounts of data. I notice it often when watching a single YouTube video in incognito mode, the sidebar is usually full of fairly racist Australian content (I am Australian). This is something I would never normally see, and not something that's likely coming from whatever video I've decided to watch in incognito. It's likely just assuming based on what's a common trend in my location.

        If an algorithm knows you well, it's usually pretty okay, but until that point you're being bombarded with lowest common denominator content based on your demographic. Shorts seems to be even worse; mine is mostly science facts and comedy skits, I didn't understand the "brainrot" descriptions until I looked at a few in incognito mode.

    • By neoromantique 2026-02-213:03

      I don't know, just an anecdote:

      I populated my Instagram/FB Account with my interests (I mainly have the accounts to follow local racing leagues / marketplaces), and feeds are mostly cars and tech stuff, seldom do I see any thirst traps in it (including reels).

    • By thephyber 2026-02-214:57

      > But it would be good for more people to learn about this so they don't get angry when they see their male-identified partners/friends feeds.

      You seem to be assuming that none of them fall for the thirst traps. The reason thirst traps exist is because they work a good percentage of the time.

      And despite your confident statement that “it doesn’t bother me anymore”, you only become “banner blind” to some content. The more authentic the content appears or the closer the topic is to something you are interested in, the more likely you are to engage with it.

      I try to avoid BookFace with a passion, but I struggle with these issues on YouTube. My solution is to never browse YouTube while logged in, always use Incognito Mode, depend on browser bookmarks (instead of like/subscribe), and to close the browser as soon as I realize The Algo is pushing content I don’t care for.

    • By boxedemp 2026-02-213:261 reply

      This is one of the reasons I always identify as non-binary when asked.

      • By GorbachevyChase 2026-02-214:072 reply

        That is a pretty clever algorithm hack. I wonder if you get bombarded with pharmaceutical ads as a consequence.

        • By Melonai 2026-02-2113:131 reply

          I also put "non-binary" somewhere on Instagram, and almost every single ad is clothing related, mostly alternative fashion. I'm guessing that's partially aimed at my interests but I almost never buy clothes online, especially not from Instagram. Occasionally I see advertisements for surveys about LGBT people and also sometimes very rarely support sites on how to find queer-friendly therapists, and I bet I could find someone to prescribe something on such a site, but in total I've probably only seen 1-2 ads like that. Never direct pharmaceutical ads though, I do wonder what that would look like...

          • By Melonai 2026-02-2113:30

            I also wanted to add a story about my fiancé's Instagram account feed, which degenerated into this sort of stuff out of nowhere one day. He has an account about art, he curated his feed, reels, explore tab so that he can see content by other people in his niche, I've seen it myself, all his reels were correctly related to what the account was about. Then one day, out of nowhere, all that disappeared. It's as if the algorithm completely reset, and reverted this account to a completely blank slate, around 1-2 years back. To this day if you look at his explore tab, it's about 75% thirst traps (and I doubt this is the kind he'd be interested in), alongside some extremely broad reaching content, some soccer memes in foreign languages, some "skits", if you can call them that, and extremely bad generic "memes". I saw it happen in front of me, he did not engage with anything like that, he's also not really the type to click on random thirst traps and he has no trouble spotting the usual AI slop. It happened from one hour to another, in an instant. He's still mad about it.

        • By boxedemp 2026-02-2118:55

          I block pretty much all ads, but that's an interesting question.

    • By kwanbix 2026-02-214:33

      Facebook changes to be more like TikTok. Content to generate addiction so they can sell more adds.

    • By djmips 2026-02-219:11

      I don't have them... :/

    • By veunes 2026-02-2120:18

      The part I really agree with is the social impact

    • By asveikau 2026-02-2116:15

      > Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do.

      I don't know what I did, but this has not been true of my account. A few years ago I did notice a sharp increase of AI slop filled with comments thinking it was real, which I found hilarious, but it wasn't thirst traps. It was more like "this person has a hidden talent and they are sad because they aren't recognized. Show them some love." And the person is obviously fake. I saw the same fake AI people in multiple languages.

      Anyway, after a while that stuff lessened a lot, and the feed is a bit more reasonable. Mainly I get stuff that was posted on TikTok a few months ago. Lately there are a lot of quotations from the Epstein files.

    • By jalapenos 2026-02-2114:05

      Algorithm has discovered dudes like boobs.

      More news at ten.

    • By basch 2026-02-2117:36

      Interestingly enough when you tell Facebook you’re not interested in a post you can answer why: doesn’t match interests, spam, sexual, insult, don’t like creator. One of those isn’t like the other.

      There’s a couple other pseudo-erudite slop holes you can fall into. One is scientific breakthroughs, one is psychedelic philosophical ramblings, and one is historical summarizations. They all kind of fall into a Ripley’s Believe it or Not style of trying to be mind blowing.

      If you say not interested to every suggested post of something you don’t follow, it’ll try a couple topics and then revert for a bit to exclusively things you do follow.

    • By Footprint0521 2026-02-2115:05

      This is why I gave up on social media

    • By dom96 2026-02-2023:582 reply

      Have you tried clicking "Show me less like this" on those thirst trap posts?

      • By disantlor 2026-02-210:15

        yes i deleted facebook eventually because they would not stop showing me this stuff despite clicking “show me less” many times

      • By jedberg 2026-02-210:18

        Many many times. It works for about an hour. I gave up. I've been on the internet long enough to have a pretty strong mental ad blocker. :)

    • By steezeburger 2026-02-213:35

      I don't like anything even slightly thirst trappy, and my fyp is clean.

    • By guerrilla 2026-02-2112:231 reply

      > No, it's not. Once Meta identifies you as male, you will get almost exclusively thirst trap posts no matter what you do. It started about two years ago.

      Bullshit. This happens because you engaged. I never engaged with it in the slightest and it disappeared. I mostly just get snakes and local stuff now.

      • By Sxubas 2026-02-2112:31

        I can second this. The app basically shows more of what is proven to keep you in the app. It's kinda revealing to be frank: instead of getting mad with it just do some introspection.

    • By tallanvor 2026-02-2119:47

      I don't. Instead Facebook tries to shove right-wing crap down my throat. I'd rather see the thirst trap posts, to be honest.

      Snapchat, on the other hand, I had to uninstall because the stuff they tried to make me view was completely and utterly disgusting (think pimple-popping vids and worse). There was only one person left that I communicated with through their app, so it wasn't a real loss for me.

  • By euleriancon 2026-02-2018:4015 reply

    I had a similar experience recently, where I logged in to Facebook after not using it for years and was shocked by how much garbage was there. My spouse does use Facebook somewhat regularly so I looked at her feed and it was much more reasonable.

    I wonder if for those of us that haven't used Facebook in years the recommendation algorithm is essentially default. Which much like the default youtube algorithm, is completely garbage. But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.

    • By tencentshill 2026-02-2019:001 reply

      I would assume inactive accounts get "sold" to the algorithm's lowest bidders. If you're not generating new information, there's nothing to scrape or sell. You must be pretty locked down outside of Facebook as well (you've actually toggled privacy settings, ever).

    • By Maxion 2026-02-2019:173 reply

      I logged in to instagram after like 5 years and my whole feed is literally just thots and AI generated content, even though I follow a crapload of accounts.

      • By davio 2026-02-2022:311 reply

        I did "not interested" & "This post makes me uncomfortable" for a solid month and now have a reliable feed of comedians, tacos, golden retrievers, classic jazz drummers, etc. The algorithm thought I turned Mexican and gave me exclusively Spanish content for a month but I just kind of went along with it.

        • By emseetech 2026-02-213:28

          I found that "not interested" didn't work for me, that I had to explicitly state what I was interested in and only then did my suggestions become relevant. It will at times revert to slop and then I have to go through the process all over again.

      • By ryandrake 2026-02-2019:371 reply

        Not just thots but thots with inevitable links to their OnlyFans pages. It seems that FB and Instagram's primary purpose has become funneling people into OnlyFans. I wonder if Zucc has caught on to this and is at least getting some revenue share from OF.

        • By JohnMakin 2026-02-2020:163 reply

          He has testified to congress that IG/meta does not promote sexual content, which is nuts, because anyone who’s spent 5 mins on the platform knows this absolutely not the case

          • By naravara 2026-02-2020:561 reply

            In my experience it’s mostly sexual adjacent content with just enough plausible deniability that you could say it’s a comedic sketch or something. They’re not funny, and the punchline is usually tits, but it has the cosmetic structure of a joke.

            • By Maxion 2026-03-0423:01

              Yeah linktr.ee links instead of OF links.

          • By r_lee 2026-02-2021:07

            I think its just by nature very engaging, as dudes will go look at other posts and comment (at least the older ones) about their looks etc...

          • By socalgal2 2026-02-2118:372 reply

            Both can be true. IG/Meta does not promote sexual content. Users promote sexual content. That might be subtle but there is a real distinction.

            • By kirubakaran 2026-02-222:07

              > That might be subtle but there is a real distinction.

              A distinction without a difference, as the expression goes

            • By JohnMakin 2026-02-222:22

              And who controls what user content goes into user feeds?

      • By dlev_pika 2026-02-2020:59

        Same with mine - all thirst traps in the search, which I have never really searched for.

    • By toomuchtodo 2026-02-2019:152 reply

      Try https://www.fbpurity.com/ I'm using it for Facebook interface needs until I can get something more agentic in my browser operational.

      https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

      • By rhyperior 2026-02-2019:201 reply

        The only way you can use FB imo.

        • By Smalltalker-80 2026-02-2110:33

          Agreed. I'm over 50, so I'm 'allowed' to use FB ;-), for those few posts of the last remaining family and friends there. Using FBP, I only see new posts of friends in chronological order. But FB still f*cks you, because it does not show all updates of everyone. When the algo decides you've had enough, you simply reach the 'end' of your feed. Well when FB, sessions keep getting shorter and shorter... There are some EU laws in the making that might change things, though.

      • By ForHackernews 2026-02-2022:00

    • By ge96 2026-02-2018:594 reply

      YT is like this too, if you're not logged in, thirst trap, crazy stuff until you build up a search history (even not logged in)

      • By MattGrommes 2026-02-2019:581 reply

        Not sure why people are downvoting this, it's absolutely true. I watch a lot of youtube on my TV and I can tell in milliseconds if it's logged me out and I'm seeing the default feed. It's fully insane and inane.

        • By recursivecaveat 2026-02-2021:441 reply

          It only takes me a few seconds of scrolling in a private window to hit an AI-generated cat head on pregnant human woman barfing rainbows on the floor: 63M views. Really makes you believe in the dead internet theory, just that they're all in their own little slop algorithm world. Or maybe it's ipad babies after all.

          • By wildrhythms 2026-02-2023:07

            Everywhere I go I see parents letting their kids scroll short form video. The brain rot starts early.

      • By KellyCriterion 2026-02-2020:231 reply

        True: You have to curate your feed / search history a little bit to get much better results

        • By loloquwowndueo 2026-02-2023:09

          Or, just search for the thing you’re looking for directly, and otherwise don’t rely on the feed to feed you because it only knows to feed you crap?

      • By nephihaha 2026-02-2019:182 reply

        Now and then it gets things right, but I find a lot of YT recs to be pretty dubious, and find it is trying to bias me in this direction or that direction. It's pretty pathetic.

        The search function is also useless. About the only Scottish history content I ever get rec'd is Scotland History Tours. While I like his channel, it is not the only show in town and it doesn't go very deep.

        When I got my last YT account I could see it was trying to access which news I should see. It was trying to link me to one American party or the other. I just clicked "not interested" into most of the partisan bait content. Not my circus, not my clowns.

        • By the_af 2026-02-212:541 reply

          Interesting. I have a very different experience with YouTube, to the point I consider it my favorite social network thingy. My search history and subscriptions are carefully curated, and I mostly get "more of the same", with pretty good recommendations for stuff that usually interests me. Also, zero "thirsty" stuff.

          Logged out, YouTube is of course a complete mess.

          • By nephihaha 2026-02-2111:40

            Logged out, YouTube suggests me endless videos about MMA fighting or trash for children. I only use the YouTube app for commenting. I use Brave to avoid constant adverts.

            I do notice though that YouTube is always trying to bias me in one direction or another. I have a friend whose feed is full of Trumpbait and stuff about how Putin is about to die and the Ukraine war is about to end. (Sounds fine except these videos have been saying that for four or five years.) Whatever one things about these things, the videos he gets are very propagandistic and have ridiculous AI thumbnails and titles. Usually of Putin or Trump scowling at something. He also gets suggested a lot of food videos (okay, I suppose) and often ones about Nazis and WW2 (a bit fetishistic, but to be fair he did history at university).

            My non-political YouTube suggestions tend to be about popular music from decades ago. I emphasise "about". I notice the algo more rarely suggests actual music itself. I suspect this is because YT has to pay out money for music but not videos about it. I get some local history stuff (which is interesting but usually not about areas I know well). I very rarely get suggested much in the way of Scottish, Irish or Welsh content, in spite of viewing a lot of it. Never anything about what's happening with Scottish politics (always from a London perspective) or the parliament here.

    • By idunno246 2026-02-2019:271 reply

      I still log in fairly regularly and get a bunch of reasonably targeted content, but also a ton of ragebait ai shit like protestors attacking cops. So it’s a bit of both, they’re just flooded with bad ai posts. It’s changed drastically in the past year, from a bunch of posts you could argue make sense, to mostly posts of rage. But the number of actual friends posts is basically zero

      • By Spooky23 2026-02-2020:371 reply

        The problem is you have to be defensive. If you mess up once and click some AI reading Reddit posts or hawk-tua style street interview, you’re cooked.

        You used to be able to reset by watching stupid financial content with high value like gold coin stuff and cleanse, but Meta is smarter now.

        • By wildrhythms 2026-02-2023:05

          Every social media algorithm is like this now. Accidentally viewing certain types of videos are like dropping a nuclear bomb in your carefully nursed algorithm.

    • By georgemcbay 2026-02-2020:24

      > But if we did use it (which I have no intention of doing), it would start being more reasonable.

      It would start being more "relevant" but not necessarily more reasonable.

      I hadn't used Facebook regularly in many years but recently posted a story about the passing of my 18 year old cat. I did this as a way of informing friends and family I don't communicate with on a constant basis that I was going through a bad time (I was very fond of my cat).

      My Facebook algorithm is now just almost entirely a solid wall of people I don't know announcing the death of their cat. A non-stop parade of personal tragedies.

      I can see the connection of how one thing led to the other but it also highlights how clumsy and soulless these algorithmic systems are.

    • By conductr 2026-02-2020:51

      I think it just throws the most engaging content at you hoping you get lured into using it more then the algo will update once it sees how you behave.

      For me, it's almost all thirst traps for several years. More recently it learned that I like 90s/00s rock, which is a fad again, so it started showing me some of that. Also, I am a sucker for stand up comedy clips and it feeds me that now. So that was a hint that it does start to become more reasonable. But, if I start to scroll it only goes 3-5 posts deep before thirst gets put back in the rotation no matter what I do.

      I've been using it more than ever in the last ~2 years, just because my old friends started sending me videos to the music related stuff so I click it and it opens in FB. We chat on messenger and I guess that little DM airplane logo is how they found a way to get me into it on occasion. Granted, my friends send me like 5-10 videos a day and I only watch them about once a month to get caught up, I can tell it's trying really hard to make a DAU out of me.

    • By npilk 2026-02-2018:491 reply

      Yeah, this makes sense. It does sort of imply that new users would just see a bunch of garbage, which you'd think isn't ideal. On the other hand, how many new users could possibly still be signing up for Facebook? So maybe it's not a problem as they just manage the decline.

      • By bmurphy1976 2026-02-2018:55

        It's nonsensical rage/click baiting garbage. You are the product, not the user.

        Anybody who hasn't used FB in a long time almost certainly has 100s if not 1000s of posts from friends and family that they missed. Instead of this garbage it should be "Hey, we haven't seen you in awhile! Here's all the fun and important stuff you missed out on."

        That might actually get me to engage with the platform because that would be putting my needs first and foremost. But that's not what FB does and not what FB ever did. Zuck never had our best interests in mind, so why would it put our interests first?

    • By socalgal2 2026-02-2118:36

      It does make me wonder if that system is a net positive or a net negative. For me, I go, see suggested stuff which is all trash, and never want to engage with FB ever again. I stay only because of friends but only check once a week or so. Where as, if they got rid of all suggested stuff and instead it was 100% friends and family and every 5 posts, an ad. I'd engage with it far more often.

    • By mkehrt 2026-02-2019:42

      My facebook page, which is where I have friended everyone I met between like 2004 and 2017 is absolute garbage.

      But I have a secondary account where I follow a few specific niche groups on a specific topic that are only on facebook. This page is actually fine, and is pretty good at suggesting related pages.

      Not sure what the takeaway is for facebook though.

    • By speckx 2026-02-2018:55

      Same here, I use it once every year or so. I get AI slop when I log in that is mostly like this blog post.

      My wife, who uses it maybe once or twice a month, does not AI slop, she showed me her feed. Nor does my friend who uses it daily. It's definitely based on usage or lack of usage.

    • By veunes 2026-02-2120:21

      Active account with real interactions = more normal. Which is a pretty telling product story in itself

    • By Groxx 2026-02-2019:58

      From seeing the feeds of a few categories of people near me (some using it semi-professionally, some just personally, some like me that avoid it unless strictly necessary)... it really does seem to be all of them. Absolute garbage is a majority, and they all complain about missing things they actually care about (though to be fair this has been true ever since it left colleges).

      Facebook is truly awful to everyone. I can't believe people don't try harder to leave.

    • By steve-atx-7600 2026-02-213:04

      Same. F|_|cking wasteland. Immediately logged out. Won’t go back.

    • By mieko 2026-02-2019:19

      I wonder this too about X: when I sundowned my Twitter account when I started seeing 80% "no question literal nazi-posting" by bluechecks on my feed, I unfollowed everyone and kept the account just to prevent someone posting on what was my username for over a decade.

      So now that I follow no one, when I click a link from Reddit or HN to X, my "For You" page is:

      - Asian pornography; AI generated "vibes" videos of machines doing "oddly satisfying" things; Elon Musk; American right-wing politicians and pundits screaming about "woke" or jerking off ICE videos; AI or real public sex outdoors at festivals?

      Of course, I don't use X, and don't seek this stuff out, and only see it there.

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